Altering the ocean or atmosphere to mitigate the effects of climate change is an approach called geoengineering. For scientists, these techniques were long considered taboo. But now, that’s changing. Researchers and startups are launching three geoengineering field experiments in Israel, Australia and Massachusetts this year. But will they work and could there be unintended consequences? WSJ reporter Eric Niiler tells host Alex Ossola about these projects, and what they could mean for the future of the planet.
This transcript was prepared by a transcription service. This version may not be in its final form and may be updated.
Alex Ossola: Welcome to Tech News Briefing. It's Thursday, February 15th. I'm Alex Ossola for The Wall Street Journal. Coming up on today's show, some companies are testing Microsoft's new AI assistant, Copilot, and employees have been eager to try it out, but does the bot live up to the hype? WSJ reporter Tom Dotan tells us whether early testers say it's worth the money. And then, scientists are resorting to once unthinkable solutions to mitigate the effects of climate change. We'll hear about three geoengineering projects planned for this year and what scientists hope to achieve from WSJ reporter Eric Niiler. But first, for the past six months, employees at some companies have gotten the chance to test Microsoft's new AI assistant called Copilot. It's an upgrade for Microsoft 365 that plugs into Word, Outlook and Teams, and it uses the same technology as OpenAI's ChatGPT. Microsoft is hoping for one of its biggest hit products in decades, but what did the early adopters have to say? WSJ reporter Tom Dotan is here to tell us more. Tom, what kinds of things can Copilot do?
Tom Dotan: One of the ones that has turned out to be one of the most popular is transcription. So if you are in a video meeting, it would be listening in the background. It could do a transcript, it could summarize everything that we talked about in our meeting. It could come up with action items. And then also within Word, it can generate documents based on prompts. So you could say, write me a business proposal. It can do some Excel functions, and then it can do powerful, more complicated stuff like I've just made up a business proposal in Word and I could tell it, can you convert it into a PowerPoint presentation that I could show at my next board meeting? That's something that it can use its AI technology to generate.
Alex Ossola: So Copilot has been out for six months now. What are people saying about it?
Tom Dotan: I talked to a bunch of people at companies that have been testing it, and I would say the reviews are mostly positive, although not overwhelmingly so. The Teams features, all that transcription stuff, that's turned out to be really popular. The stuff that people are less enthusiastic about or just straight up say, just is bad, is like Excel. It makes a lot of mistakes. And then the email stuff, I would say is a mixed bag. The new gadget syndrome of people wanting to try out a new toy is very strong. And from what I've heard, talking to chief information officers inside a lot of these companies, when they send out the note to their employees saying, "Hey, we have 300 seats available to try out Office Copilot, anybody in?" the interest is extremely high. The requests come flooding in.
Alex Ossola: So companies are paying for this. How much does it cost per seat and are people finding it to be worth the price?
Tom Dotan: That's really the question. It's $30 per person per month, and that price is on top of the price that a company is already paying to license the Office or Microsoft 365 Suite. And the question for a lot of these companies is, if we are effectively going to be doubling the amount of money we're giving Microsoft in order to use this AI Copilot, are we getting $30 more efficiency per person? By and large, the answer has been no for most of the people that I talk to, or at least they don't think it's worth it for every person in the company.
Alex Ossola: Is that the kind of feedback that Microsoft has said that they've gotten too?
Tom Dotan: They confirm the fact that there's been very enthusiastic demand. I talked to an executive who said they've never gotten such enthusiastic demand for a product before. Satya Nadella, the CEO of Microsoft, was saying similar things in a recent earnings call.
Alex Ossola: So right now that software is where it is. What could Microsoft do to make it better, make it more useful?
Tom Dotan: Well, of the shortcomings that people mention to me, one of them is hallucinations. We're all familiar with this now. When you're messing around with ChatGPT or a similar large language model, it spits out a response and it just makes up the information. It's just flat out wrong. And that happens constantly from what I hear with Microsoft's Copilot. Other issues are with Excel. These large language models are most effective when they're typing up words in paragraphs and sentences, whereas Excel is numbers-based and they're just not good at that. And then the last thing is there tends to be a major drop-off in usage over time in really any new piece of software. It's like you get a new toy and you start playing with it at first and then you forget about it after a couple of months. The same sort of thing seems to happen with Copilot and one company that I talked to said there was a 20% drop-off in usage after one month outside of Teams.
Alex Ossola: That was our reporter, Tom Dotan. For more of your daily tech headlines, check out TNB Tech Minute that's right here in the Tech News Briefing feed. Coming up, could adding stuff to the air and the sea actually helps save the planet? That's after the break. Dumping chemicals in the ocean and spraying particles into the sky in an effort to mitigate the effects of climate change are approaches that have long been considered taboo among scientists. Now though, researchers are undertaking geoengineering experiments outside the lab. Scientists are looking at whether these approaches work and if there will be unintended consequences. WSJ reporter Eric Niiler joins us now. Eric, there are three big projects underway this year. Tell me about each one of them and how they work and where they're taking place.
Eric Niiler: The first one that's underway right now is off the coast of Australia, the sort of northeastern coast, and they've got a project to brighten the clouds above the Great Barrier Reef. They've got one ship that's sailing across the Barrier Reef, got another one that's kind of following along to monitor, and they've got an airplane in the sky. They're taking seawater from the ocean, making a briny mixture, forcing it through these high-pressure machines and spraying this mist up into the low-lying clouds, the marine clouds. What they're trying to do is increase the surface of the water vapor in the clouds, which would have more reflective capability. So basically brighten these clouds and reflect more sun away from the patch of water where the Great Barrier Reef is. The Great Barrier Reef has suffered a lot from high ocean temperatures and some other predation and other things, and they're hoping this will basically shade the reef and help it recover.
Alex Ossola: Okay. Tell us about the second project.
Eric Niiler: There's another project underway this summer also in the ocean off the coast of Massachusetts that's planned for August. The Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution has devised an experiment to put alkaline solution similar to lye, a detergent, into the water, sodium hydroxide that would basically force a chemical reaction to draw carbon dioxide out of the air and into the water and safely store it there and perhaps cool the planet.
Alex Ossola: And tell us about the third project, which is perhaps the most controversial. It's from an Israeli startup called Stardust Solutions.
Eric Niiler: They are doing aerial testing of an idea called solar radiation management, also known as stratospheric aerosol injection, but basically flying really high in an airplane, releasing reflective particles, some kind of aerosol particle that would reflect sunlight very high above the clouds above where the weather takes place at 40, 50, 60,000 feet up in the atmosphere, the stratosphere.
Alex Ossola: So what's different about these projects or this moment?
Eric Niiler: What's different now is instead of debates, journal articles, scientific meetings or even movies or books, is these have gone from the lab to outdoor field trials, and that's the first time. You've got three big projects happening this year. They're on ships, they're on planes, they build things, they've got machines working and they're testing these things, there's particles, the chemicals in the ocean, and they're going to be watching and seeing if they can detect movement, if they can grab that CO2 somehow or reflect that sunlight to make a difference, to cool the planet.
Alex Ossola: These are smaller scale experiments to test these methods. What happens after they're complete? Will the scientists do them on a larger scale?
Eric Niiler: These are scientists doing these things. They're really out there collecting information. Even the private company that's doing this says, "We're collecting information. We can't cool the planet ourselves." Anything to do that would require international treaties, cooperation from many countries, millions, billions, trillions of dollars. That would be a massive effort. So that could be years away and it would require a lot more discussion. The United Nations is starting to discuss these things.
Alex Ossola: With some of these experiments, it's understandable that reservations would be not only that they don't work, but that they actually have detrimental effects. What are some of the risks of these projects?
Eric Niiler: That's a good point. They don't know. There's some belief through computer modeling that you could see changes in rainfall patterns, for example. If you reflect too much of the sunlight, if you change the Earth's balance of energy coming in and energy going out, if you start tinkering with that, you could see perhaps a change in the protective ozone layer, which prevents radiation from coming into the Earth's atmosphere, in the lower atmosphere. There could be changes in crop patterns or marine life, plankton, for example. They're very important for the food chain.
Alex Ossola: Zooming out a little bit, let's assume that at least some of these experiments do work and they prove that there is something to these methods. Is the intention to simply reverse the effects of climate change? How would all this fit together?
Eric Niiler: In a word, no. The scientists involved in all of these projects tell me that this is really to buy time. This is no substitute for switching to carbon-free sources of energy, to driving more electric cars. If some of these projects work in the short term, that could buy us us time to switch to carbon-free energy sources, for example, a decade from now.
Alex Ossola: That was our reporter, Eric Niiler. And that's it for Tech News Briefing. Today's show was produced by Julie Chang with supervising producer Katherine Milsop. I'm Alex Ossola for The Wall Street Journal. We'll be back this afternoon with TNB Tech Minute. Thanks for listening.
Zoe Thomas is the host of Tech News Briefing. Before joining The Wall Street Journal, she was a producer and reporter for BBC News. Zoe has covered business, economics and technology stories across North and South America and Asia. She has been based out of bureaus in San Francisco, Mumbai and her hometown of New York. When not at work, you can often find her searching for new culinary delights or food trends to test out.
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